Abstract

The Structural Transformation of the Courtly Public Sphere. On the Use of Media in Courtly Life from the 16th to the 18th Century

Up to the beginning of the 18th century, princely, dynastic power structures were to a large extent based on personal interaction and presence at court; a fact which requires an explanation for the enormous quantity of early modern printed works dealing with courtly events. The relationship between media based on the presence of the participants at courtly events and a consequent reworking in print media predicated on the distance of consumers can only be addressed adequately by using a three-stage model. Courtly communication based on presence (stage 1) is first converted into a printed publication controlled and financed by the court itself (stage 2). This is the point at which the co-presence inherent to a specific occasion is transmitted into what can genuinely be termed a courtly public sphere. In a next step (stage 3) the power-affirming publications issued by the court are reworked and mined for compilations produced by commercially orientated publishers catering to the demands of the book market. These publishers belonged to a political, journalistic public sphere centred on newspapers and latently critical of the court. This article examines the three-stage model sketched above on the basis of three court-related genres: festival descriptions, genealogies and state calendars whose contents were reworked to produce the compilatory genres of ceremony manuals, universal genealogies and directories of European court officials. Distinguishing between two spheres of publication of courtly themes in this way has methodological implications which are also examined here.